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A Victory in Kobani?

A street in Kobani, Syria, after Kurdish fighters and American bombers pushed out ISIS. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY RAUF MALTAS/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY

The Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has suffered its first major defeat in Syria. An unusual coalition—Kurdish warriors fighting room to room on the ground and Western warplanes bombing on a daily basis from the skies—has forced the militants out of Kobani, a dusty Syrian town that was built around a train stop near the Turkish border a century ago. (I wrote about an earlier stage of the struggle for the magazine.)

Kurds hoisted their yellow flag atop Kobani’s highest hill late on Monday, to replace the Islamic State’s black-and-white banner. The fighters, who had only vintage arms, danced by firelight into the night. U.S. Central Command praised the Kurds for fighting “aggressively, with resilience and fortitude.” Since October, Kobani has been the test case for American power against the jihadi onslaught.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIL, still holds more than twenty thousand square miles in Syria and Iraq, the Pentagon said on Friday—roughly twice the area of Massachusetts. Despite two thousand airstrikes by American, European, and Arab warplanes since August 8th, the Islamic State has lost only one per cent of the land it seized in Iraq, and it continues to expand in Syria.

“Nobody is declaring any sort of strategic turning point or anything like that,” a senior Administration official told me yesterday. “However, in terms of the early phase of this multiyear campaign, we see Kobani as significant. That’s why we are encouraged by the trends we’re seeing now.” He added, “The fact that ISIL poured thousands of fighters into Kobani and failed—it is a decisive defeat.”

In addition to the Islamic State’s loss of territory in Kobani, more than two thousand militants were killed, U.S. officials said. The militia may be running out of steam, at least temporarily. “ISIL maintains pockets of resistance, and the fighting is likely far from over,” Colonel Edward Thomas, a spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me. “But ISIL chose to make Kobani a strategic stand and objective. It was a hill they were prepared to die on, and that’s exactly what has happened in the last several months. ISIL’s momentum has been slowed significantly and reversed in some areas, and their losses have continued to mount.”

Stuart Jones, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, told Al Arabiya last week that more than six thousand militants, including many top commanders, have died in Iraq and Syria since launching their blitz last summer. Some are apparently no longer so keen on martyrdom. The senior Administration official also said that the human toll may be demoralizing to ISIS. “We track quite closely the over-all attrition of its ranks, its vehicles, and the dissension it has caused within the organization,” he said. “We understand that a lot of its fighters now are simply refusing to go to Kobani, and the fighters refusing to go to Kobani are being assassinated by ISIL.”

The campaign has been expensive for the West. The U.S.-led coalition ran more than six hundred airstrikes on Kobani—eighty per cent of all its bombings in Syria—which cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Kobani has certainly paid a price. Fighting and bombings have destroyed half the city, which now has no economy, let alone electricity. There is little left for the forty thousand residents who fled; many may remain refugees for some time.

Kobani’s fate could have little impact on how the rest of Syria fares. It may be true, as the senior Administration official told me, that in areas of northern Iraq where ISIS’s command and control is broken down, “its ability to direct fighters to certain areas of the front—where, whenever fighters go there, they never return—is not nearly what it was four months ago.” But the Islamic State nevertheless appears capable of recruiting more men. Twenty thousand foreigners have now gone to fight in Syria and Iraq. It is “the largest mobilization of foreign fighters in Muslim countries since 1945,” the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, at King’s College London, reported on Monday.

The total number of foreign fighters now exceeds that of foreigners mobilized during the ten-year war against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, which was the genesis of extremist movements like Al Qaeda. Unlike the situation in the eighties, though, nearly a fifth of today’s fighters—some four thousand—are residents or nationals of Western European countries, the I.C.S.R. reported. The largest numbers come from France, Britain, and Germany. Others come from Ukraine, China, and New Zealand.

U.S. training for a new, five-thousand-man Syrian rebel force, to battle both the Islamic State and the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, does not get under way until March, and it isn’t expected to be capable of recapturing lost ground until next year. Of the four northern provinces that American-backed rebels held a year ago, three and a half have been lost to either extremist rivals or Assad’s government forces. For at least the next year, America’s focus is primarily in Iraq.

Diplomatic efforts to put a stop to Syria’s multiple wars—and a death toll nearing a quarter of a million people—are going nowhere. The U.N. proposal to “freeze” the conflict around Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and commercial center, is itself frozen. And the largest Syrian anti-government opposition group, based in Turkey, has balked at participating in a new Russian peace initiative, on the grounds that it will only perpetuate Assad’s rule.

On Monday, as the Islamic State retreated to villages on Kobani’s outskirts, its spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani appealed in a video for followers in the West to “target the crusaders in their own lands” with any available weapon, “whether an improvised explosive device, bullets, a knife, car bomb, or a fist.”

Robin Wright is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, and has written for the magazine since 1988.